6 Abandoned Cart Email Examples to Get Back Abandoned Customers

Abandoned Cart Email provides an effective way to minimize revenue loss due to abandoned shopping carts and get customers to come back to your E-Commerce store. In fact, Cart Abandonment is one of the biggest pain points of running an E-commerce Store. According to Shopify, almost 68% of online carts are abandoned before customers make a purchase. That’s a lot of revenue left on the table. Here are 6 Abandoned Cart Email tactics you can use to recover abandoned visitors and customer to your online store.

What is an Abandoned Cart Email?

While doing online shopping, if you exit a checkout without completing your purchase, you’re likely to receive an email from the online store reminding you about the abandoned shopping cart items and persuading you to complete the purchase. This is known as an abandoned cart email. There are various reasons for shopping cart abandonment (pricing, shipping costs, lack of time, complicated checkout, etc) that prevent people from buying their cart items. Abandoned Cart emails enable businesses to help abandoned visitors overcome those obstacles and complete their purchase.

6 Abandoned Cart Email Examples to Bring back lost customers

Here are 6 ways to write abandoned cart emails to re-engage abandoned visitors and customers, and convince them to complete their purchase.

1. Specify their shopping cart items

If people have abandoned online shopping carts, then it’s very likely that they have forgotten about their cart items. So it’s important to specify the remaining shopping cart items in your abandoned cart emails to remind people what they had intended to buy from your online store, in the first place. Here’s a great example of an abandoned cart email by J. Crew Factory that illustrates how important it is to remind people about their shopping cart contents.

Showing people their shopping cart items makes your abandoned cart email more personal, and reminds them of what they’re missing out. You can even mention the items up front, in your subject lines, and even provide discounts to entice people to come back to your store and complete the purchase.

2. Be Genuine

Sometimes, people abandon their shopping carts simply because they don’t trust your brand enough, or because they found a similar or the same product on a more credible website. So it’s important to be genuine in your abandoned cart emails, and clearly remind people about your brand values to build their trust and create a strong relationship.

Although your values will be evident in everything you do, many times it helps to explicitly communicate them to our customers – who you are, how you value customers, and what you do to provide the best customer experience. Here’s an amazing example of how Ghurka builds customer trust by being genuine & personal.

They start their abandoned cart email by addressing the customer by their name and reminding them about the items in their shopping cart. They further use words like “handmade” and “limited” to convey that they take great care while sourcing products. They also thank him for thinking about their brand. All the while, they focus on the abandoned shopping item.

If you remind people why they liked your brand in the first place, you’ll very likely persuade them to come back and make the purchase.

3. Be Personal

Email personalization is a no-brainer and I’ve included it here for the sake of completeness. You have to make your abandoned cart emails as personalized as possible. As mentioned above, using recipients’ name and displaying their shopping cart items is just the first step towards personalizing abandoned cart emails.

How can you personalize it further?

Here’s an awesome example of how Ugmonk takes email personalization to a whole new level.

Notice how they even personalize the email copy. First of all, the email looks like a simple message that you would receive from a friend, with just a logo and plain text. Secondly, the abandoned cart email is sent by non other than the owner, Jeff, who not only reaches out to the customer to see if he’s facing any problems, but also assures him about the credibility of their products.

4. Provide an Incentive

One of the most common reasons for shopping cart abandonment is the price of product, or other auxiliary costs such as shipping costs, additional taxes, etc. May be people abandon their cart because they find your product to be more expensive than they imagined, or they found the same product at a lower price on another site. With that in mind, you can try offering incentives, that are specific to the cart items and possibly exclusive to the user, in your abandoned cart emails. Offering a discount will take care of the “extra cost” in user’s mind, and provide the final push to make the purchase.

Here’s how Saatchi Art does it by reminding customers that their abandoned items risk being sold out and offering a 10% discount if they purchase those items today. It not only offers an incentive but also created a sense of urgency, which can be a very compelling way to recover abandoned visitors.

You can also offer free shipping, since this seems to be one of the most common pet peeves of Ecommerce shoppers. Here’s an example of how Huckberry offers free shipping.

On the other hand, avoid giving away too many discounts too often. Otherwise, customers will get used to it and hold off on completing the checkout, till they get an abandoned cart email.

5. Entice with Related Items

Sometimes, people abandon shopping carts because they were unable to find exactly what they were looking for. Sure, they must have added items to their cart, but probably they were looking for something else or something better.

In your abandoned cart emails, you can also provide alternatives to their shopping cart items, or suggest related items that they may not have noticed before.

Here’s an example of how Moss Bros includes alternatives to the shopping cart items in their abandoned cart emails.

Here’s another example of how Ralph Lauren suggests items that are related to the ones added to the user’s cart.

6. Use Customer Testimonials & Reviews

People like to buy things from brands they can trust, or that they have, at least, heard good things about. That’s why online reviews and testimonials are displayed on most websites – to build credibility about the business, its products & services. However, it’s possible that people might have missed it while browsing your website, and so they aren’t sure whether to complete their purchase or not. Consequently, they may end up abandoning their shopping cart. Therefore, it’s a good idea to include customer testimonials and reviews in your abandoned cart emails, to gain their trust and nudge them to complete their purchase.

Here’s an example of how Casper, an E-Commerce that sells mattresses and bed linen, does it.

After displaying the abandoned cart items, they feature a testimonial from a happy customer about how great their products are. It not only reassures you of their product quality, but also makes you eager to find out if their products are actually as good as they claim to be. In this case, there’s only one way to satisfy your curiosity and that is to re-visit their site.

Abandoned Cart Email Timing

The timing of your abandoned cart email is as important as any of the above tips & tricks. You need to send abandoned cart emails within 24 hours of visitors leaving your checkout so that the shopping items are still fresh in their minds. According to a study by SalesCycle, abandoned cart emails sent within 20 minutes have a 5.2% conversion rate. Emails sent within an hour of cart abandonment had 4.5% conversion rate, whereas those sent more than 24 hours after a visitor left, had only 2.6% conversion rate.

Conclusion

Hopefully, these abandoned cart email examples will help you craft more effective emails that entice users to come back to your online store and complete their purchase. Mostly, people abandon shopping carts because they have an unanswered question or concern about your products, or your business. The key is to find out the reason for shopping cart abandonment and craft an abandoned cart email strategy that not only answers their concern but also persuades them to come back to your online store and complete their purchase.

Do you have any tips & best practices for abandoned cart email that you’d like to share?

About Sreeram Sreenivasan

Sreeram Sreenivasan has worked with various Fortune 500 Companies in areas of Business Growth, Sales & Marketing Strategy. He’s the Founder of Ubiq BI, a cloud-based BI Platform for SMBs & Enterprises.